Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs Being a story of the nation’s most famous (and infamous) detective agency

by the end of June, he had built around the mills, a protective 12-foot fence that included rifle holes, water mains capable of blasting strikers with boiling water and wires attached to a generator, which could be electrified.

This serious battle would last the next 14 hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire.

Residents borrowed the cannon that had been, that the city used for commemorations.

The crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into the river, which they attempted to light on fire in hopes of burning the Pinkertons out of their barges.

That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about it at the time.

I think like any historian, you find something interesting, you find these key peoples moving through this historical landscape and you want to know more about them, right?

I did what every other historian does, which is you go to the archives, you look at the documents.

I knew all the legends, I knew all the folktales.

The more I looked, I went to the archives, I went to the Library of Congress, I went to the company files hoping to find those really juicy details and they just weren't there.

And the more I looked, the more I found that in the archives, in their records, the company records, it was just this obsessive detailing of their reputation.